“It’s very apparent to me that the president wants to do something to Attorney General Sessions. But it’s also apparent that in the interim that Sessions owns him,” GOP Sen. Bob Corker said. | M. Scott Mahaskey/POLITICO

Republicans on Capitol Hill who have long protected Attorney General Jeff Sessions from the wrath of his own boss increasingly think his time is up.

Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee said Thursday evening that he believes “moves are being made” to oust Sessions after the midterm elections.

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“It’s apparent that after the midterms, he will make a change and choose someone to do what he wants done,” Corker said in a phone call. “It just feels to me that after the midterms, the president will make the change.” A Republican close to the White House echoed that view.

“We are in a sad place in our country’s history,” Corker added.

The news comes just hours after top Senate Republicans sent dueling signals about whether it would be safe for President Donald Trump to fire the attorney general, a move he has contemplated with anticipation for almost a year and a half but held back because Republicans senators had warned him they would not confirm a successor.

That changed on Thursday when Sen. Lindsey Graham touched off a furious debate on Capitol Hill, appearing almost to encourage Trump to send Sessions packing. The South Carolina senator said he was open to confirming another attorney general and that concerns his colleagues once harbored that Sessions’ firing would set off a chain of potentially fatal events for the president, culminating in his dismissal of special counsel Robert Mueller, were no longer operative.

“Mueller is down the road,” Graham told reporters. “To those who believe that the only way that you can protect Mueller is to keep Jeff Sessions as attorney general forever — I don’t buy it.”

Earlier in the day, GOP leaders had moved quickly to quell a rebellion against Sessions sparked by Graham’s remarks. Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley (R.-Iowa) had chimed in to say that he, too, was open to confirming another attorney general.

Sen. John Thune of South Dakota, the No. 3 GOP leader, said in an interview with POLITICO: “Do we really want to go through that kind of confirmation fight? Is there anybody we can confirm? Our conference supports Jeff. Our members are behind him. At least that’s the message they’ve tried to convey to him.”

The Senate majority whip, John Cornyn of Texas, echoed those concerns.

“It would be bad for the country, it would be bad for the president, it would be bad for the Department of Justice for him to be forced out under these circumstances,” Cornyn told reporters.

The back-and-forth on Capitol Hill came as Sessions took the rare step of defending himself and his leadership of the Justice Department after a withering attack from Trump. The president, in an interview with Fox News that aired early Thursday, said of Sessions’ recusal from the Russia investigation now overseen by special counsel Mueller: “Even my enemies say that ‘Jeff Sessions should have told you that he was going to recuse himself and then you wouldn’t have put him in.’ He took the job and then he said, ‘I’m going to recuse myself.’ I said, ‘What kind of a man is this?’”

Trump’s jabs against his top law enforcement officer have grown routine in recent months, with the president deriding him as a “weak” leader who never took control of the department. But those jabs carried extra weight in the wake of this week’s conviction of the president’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort on charges of tax evasion in a case that grew out of the Mueller investigation — and the simultaneous guilty plea by Trump’s former longtime lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen on federal campaign finance violations in New York related to his payoffs to two women who claimed they had affairs with Trump.

Sessions responded by blasting out a statement: “While I am attorney general, the actions of the Department of Justice will not be improperly influenced by political considerations. I demand the highest standards, and where they are not met, I take action.”

Republican lawmakers have long warned the president against firing Sessions and tried to prevent him from doing so by signaling their refusal to confirm a replacement. Graham himself said a year ago there would be “holy hell to pay” if Trump fired Sessions and stated point-blank: “There will be no confirmation hearing for a new attorney general in 2017. Grassley, too, was adamant he would not clear time on the Judiciary Committee’s schedule for confirmation hearings for another attorney general.

If the president were to fire Sessions and if the Senate were to fail to confirm a replacement, it would box in Trump by leaving Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein — who oversees Mueller and is another administration official Trump perceives as an enemy — in charge of the department. And it would raise major questions about the Justice Department’s independence.

Initially, Graham’s and Grassley’s sentiments were not echoed by many of their colleagues, who continued to caution the president against firing Sessions.

“I think Jeff Sessions has done a good job. That’s my personal opinion,” said Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.), a Judiciary Committee member. “I’m not trying to tell the president to do his job, but I wish the president and the attorney general could stay on and work out their differences. In this environment, I don’t know that you’d get another attorney general confirmed.”

Though more than a half-dozen GOP senators backed Sessions publicly after Graham’s and Grassley’s comments, some of the attorney general’s closest allies admitted that his job was still in the balance — much as it has been for more than a year.

“There’s a lot of tension down there. That’s all I know is what I see and read,” said Sen. Richard Shelby of Alabama, Sessions’ longtime Senate colleague. “A lot of those jobs are tenuous when you’re in the Cabinet, especially when you’re under fire. I don’t know.”

The president has been furious with Sessions since his decision in March 2017 to recuse himself from the Justice Department’s inquiry in Russian meddling in the 2016 election, and he has repeatedly derided him both in public and in private. But two Republicans close to the White House say Trump has not talked any more frequently about firing him over the past week than at other times during his presidency — and that they don’t expect him to do so imminently.

Rather, Graham’s comments appeared to be an unprompted invitation to the president to take action if he wishes — a wink-and-nod gesture that he has a friend in the Senate. If Grassley chooses to go the Senate Finance Committee after the election, Graham would become Judiciary Committee chairman. Graham is also up for reelection in 2020, and being close to Trump would help stave off a primary challenge.

By the end of the day, however, others seemed to see the writing on the wall. Some staunch Sessions allies remained tight-lipped, and even his defenders were sending a softer message. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas referred a reporter to his press office, and Sen. David Perdue of Georgia, a close Trump ally, said he had no opinion either way. “Is that up again?” Perdue said. “I haven’t heard anything like that. I don’t have any opinion.”

But Corker was clear that the attorney general still has power over the president, if only for a limited time. Between now and November’s midterm elections, Corker said, “Sessions owns him.”